The Pool

A Milestone in RPG Design

The Pool is a little RPG document written by James V. West. It's available online for free and is a recommended read for all RPG designers. While it may not look like much nowadays, at the time it was written it opened a lot of eyes.

The resolution mechanic is as simple as it is elegant. Roll some d6. If you rolled at least a single 1, then you succeed, otherwise you fail.

Using AnyDice, it's easy to compare the performance of different pool sizes. The transposed graph view is very useful for this.